Inside the artist's studio

John "Wichita Bill" Noble paints in his studio in Trepied, France.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - From adolescence, drink (or the antidotes that were tried) doomed the colorful American painter John Noble (1874-1934). But there were long, dry, productive interludes.

During an extended stay (1901-13) in northern France, “Wichita Bill,” as he was known in some circles, met a “Strasbourg girl,” married, became a father and produced much of the strange work that remains so appealing a century later.

Noble enjoyed some renown. He was famous enough, apparently, to be simply listed in a “Dispatch from Paris” (about an upcoming Paris show) printed in the New York Times. He once painted a saloon nude that came to be notoriously condemned and defaced by Carrie Nation. Perfect way to get your name out there.

He pulled stunts. He once cantered through a Paris exhibition on horseback, wearing a Stetson hat. Parisians, who still love a grand gesture, had to have been dazzled.

The artist knew his way around horses and steers, but he was a gentleman cowpoke. He lived on family money his whole life. Years after his death, writer Irving Stone gilded the Wichita Bill legend with a popular bio-novelization: “The Passionate Journey” (1949).

Even late in life, when his drinking was out of control, Noble was formidable. His son, lithographer John A. Noble (1913-1983), namesake of the Noble Maritime Collection, did not feel capable of his own artistic journey until his father was gone.

This spring, the Collection has opened “The Atelier of Wichita Bill,” a well-furnished recreation of the painter’s French studio, very much as it looks in surviving photographs.

Fortunately, the younger Noble had room to stow a wealth of family heirlooms — a desk and easel, palette, Persian rug, collapsible chair, oil lamp, ceramics painted by Amelia Peische Noble (the artist’s wife), photographs and a vintage Persian rug. The whole show, except for one or two borrowed pictures, came out of the museum’s collections.

The Collection has examined the elder Noble previously, in a 2007 father-and-son show. “The Atelier of Wichita Bill,” curated by associate director Ciro Galeno, is a period installation in bright third-floor room that looks like a good place to paint. There’s plenty of light.

The light in the room hardly mattered to Wichita Bill (who grew up in a well-to-do Wichita family, hence the name). The light he was interested in was pooled under the uppermost layer of paint, pushing up against the surface.

Noble worked in Trepied in Picardy, in northern France. There were visits to Etaples on a coast. In the show, visitors can get close to wonderful paintings like “Blessing of the Sea,” “The Bather” and the newly restored and luminous “Ille de Batz.”

Discernible forms — plough horses, a nude female and a landscape — are nearly lost in the real business of the picture: Light.

Even the ones that have not been cleaned — most of them — seem backlit. Like Albert Ryder, Noble Sr. experimented with unproved methods of upping the wattage. Unlike Ryder, his paintings aren’t literally sliding off the canvas, although they are unstable.

The artist once mentioned that his time in Paris coincided with a proliferation of “isms.” Impressionism was old news by then, of course, but other regimens had come along, like “luminism” in which the disciples were light-crazy. He was clearly attracted.

The light is romantic enough, but other elements in the picture, like people and animals, sometimes recall the Barbizon painters, social realists who paved the way for the Impressionists.

One of Noble’s friends in those days was the expatriate African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose preferred subjects were mystical/Biblical scenes, sometimes with amazing light effects. It’s easy to imagine that Noble and Tanner admired each other’s work.

Tools and tricks of the trade are revealed in “Atelier.” The artist’s brown and crusty palette is there, as are some gridded pencil drawings and cut-outs. “He gridded everything,” the curator said.

Some artists are freehand geniuses. Anything they draw is perfect the first try. Others, not so well-equipped, pursue perfection in stages. One such step involves reproducing an image bit by bit, guided by squared-off sections.

Even with such production aids, his figures are never quite right. Then again, he was far more interested in the light.

More than one long-gone presence inhabits “Atelier.” A linen “costume gown” that belonged to Gloria, the artist’s wife, sits on a mother-of-pearl-inlaid folding chair. Her skillful china pieces. adorned with lifelike painted bouquets, are on the desk in one corner of the installation.

Gloria was a woman of remarkable enthusiasm and resourcefulness. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she became a kind of early motivational/self-help speaker at women’s clubs, sharing her formula for “Living Life Gloriously.”

But in France a hundred years ago, she was her husband’s constant companion. Some recently discovered photographs of Gloria, posing for her husband in the studio as a life model, suggest that she was the original of the nymph-like beauty in “The Bather.”